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In Robert Greenwald's new film, The Koch Brothers Exposed, he examines the pervasive influence of David and Charles Koch on the American fabric of life. It covers areas as diverse as their impact on community school boards, colleges, the environment, voting rights, and think tanks. Greenwald began the film before the Occupy Wall Street movement exploded. He was eight months into conducting his own research and filming when he saw how the 1 percent was using their financial resources to promulgate their specific ideologies and economic interests.

The National Tea Party Convention, an event I'm sure many readers have already gotten tickets for, has run into a couple of snags. Fortunately there's one big-haired semi-pro ex-governor who's going to pull it out of its doldrums.

Do you ever wonder how such a small minority has so much power online and in the media? Here's one reason:

The Megaphone desktop tool is a Windows "action alert" tool developed by give Israel the appearance of large scale online support. The tool is distributed by the World Union of Jewish Students, World Jewish Congress, The Jewish Agency for Israel, World Zionist Organization, StandWithUs, Hasbara fellowships, HonestReporting, and other pro-Israel public relations, media watchdog, or activism organizations. The tool delivers real-time alerts about key articles, videos, blogs, and surveys related to Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially those perceived by GIYUS (which stands for Give Israel Your United Support) to be highly critical of Israel, so that users can vote or add comments expressing their support of Israel.

The Megaphone Desktop Tool gives the user the option of going to a particular site with a poll, and if the user chooses to go to the site, the software then casts a vote automatically, when this is technically feasible. The vote is chosen automatically by the distributors of Megaphone.

Yea, they seem like nice people, right? They keep the lawn mowed and he let you borrow a sander last year... that was nice of him, but did you know they donated $6000 to Rudy Giuliani's campaign and $2000 to George W. Bush? A clever new system featured at Huffington Post integrates political donor records with Google's map system, giving you the ability to find out who's giving to what parties and political candidates in your area, and also tell you a little something-something about your neighbors and neighborhood businesses.

You know things are going horribly, horribly wrong when New York firefighters are so disgusted with you, that they produce an "instructional video" outlining the myth that you were a good mayor, or did much to help/prevent 9/11.

Ok, that may be a bit facetious but we're all into this new age of media teasers... In what we consider here at BSAlert, the ever-increasing influence of corporations and PACs, the Supreme Court loosened restrictions Monday on corporate and union-funded television ads that air close to elections, weakening a key provision of a landmark campaign finance law.

What this means is that whoever has the most money, as usual, will exert the most influence, and as we all know, the groups with the most money are always the ones who are looking out the most for the American People(tm).

Florida evangelist Bill Keller says he was making a spiritual, not political, statement when he warned the 2.4 million subscribers to his Internet prayer ministry that "if you vote for Mitt Romney, you are voting for Satan!"

Pastor John Hagee writes in his book, "Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude To war" that Jews brought the Holocaust upon themselves by rebelling against God and that the Holocaust was God's way of forcing Jews to move to Israel where, Hagee predicts according to his interpretation of Biblical scripture, they will be mostly killed in the apocalyptic Mideast conflict Hagee's new lobbying group seems to be working to provoke and which John Hagee believes to be a necessary precondition for the "Rapture" that will lift Christians, but not Jews, bodily into Heaven to enjoy physical immortality in paradise.

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Back in March, Common Cause released "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing," which detailed the activities of nine groups masquerading as think tanks and public interest organizations when in fact they were front groups for telephone and cable companies in the net neutrality debate. Now they've added another five groups to the list: "For example, Hands off the Internet sounds like activists wanting to protect the Internet. Actually, it's a telecommunications industry-backed organization that was spending $20,000 a day on television commercials aimed at eliminating long-standing net neutrality protections so that telephone and cable companies can maximize profit and minimize competition on the Internet."

Numerous climate change skeptics have spent most of the two decades denying increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations were anything to worry about. Donald J. Boudreaux, the chairman of the Department of Economics at George Mason University and an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, takes a different tack. Referring to a recent New York Times report on increasing human longevity, Boudreaux attributes the change to the economic productivity of "capitalism." Turning to climate change, he argues that "it's a perfectly legitimate stance for truly reasonable people to conclude that the best policy regarding global warming is to neglect it -- and let capitalism continue to make us healthier and wealthier."

A tiny little movie making fun of Al Gore, supposedly made by an amateur filmmaker, recently appeared on the popular Web site YouTube.com.

At first blush, the spoof seemed like a scrappy little homemade film poking fun at Gore and his anti-global warming crusade.

Unfortunately, ABC News has found out the supposed amateur video is likely part of a professional effort coordinated by the Republican party (and likely oil company benefactors) to discredit Gore and his global warming educational campaign.

In an effort to smokescreen the global warming issue, the spoof says Al Gore claims global warming is responsible for everything from the Middle East crisis to the outcome of American Idol. Whatever humor the PAC firm DCI Group, LLC were trying to deliver is overshadowed by the totally mean-spirited and intellectually dishonest manner in which they completely distort reality.

Forget the campaign forecasting of the pundits and pollsters. Gov. Ed Rendell might have God on his side.

During a voter awareness event in the Capitol Rotunda on Tuesday, the incumbent Democrat received word via a Lycoming County minister — a registered Republican, no less — that God has “decreed” he will be re-elected to a second term.

“I was a little stunned, to be honest,” a smiling governor said afterward.

The campaign bombshell was dropped by the Rev. Carl Vining, pastor of the nondenominational House of Judah Ministries in Montgomery and a chaplain-on-call for the state Senate.

As the reverend introduced Mr. Rendell to a packed Rotunda, he told those gathered that “the God of Israel” recently sent word through him on the outcome of this year’s gubernatorial election.

Citizens Against Government Waste made a name for itself by exposing government waste. But it has quietly made a lot of its money by lobbying.

Ron Campbell, a lobbyist from SPS Consultants, successfully ran Mexican avocado growers campaign in 2004 to expand access to the U.S. market. To overcome opposition from Californian avocado growers Campbell gave Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) $100,000 to generate a 'grassroots' lobbying campaign to support his clients.

Common Cause has produced a report, titled "Wolves in Sheep's Clothing," which describes some of the astroturf front groups that have been created by the cable, telephone and internet industry to lobby for legislation favorable to corporate interests. Groups such as Consumers for Cable Choice, FreedomWorks, the Progress and Freedom Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, New Millennium Research Council, Frontiers of Freedom, Keep It Local NJ, Internet Innovation Alliance and MyWireless.org "accept subsidies or grants from corporate interests to lobby or produce research when they normally might not, but too often fail to disclose the connection between their policy positions and their bank accounts. ... These sorts of campaigns are dangerous for our democracy. They deliberately mislead citizens, and they deliberately mislead our lawmakers, who are already charged with the difficult task of making sense of complex telecommunications policies."

U.S. agribusiness giant Monsanto recently announced it was raising its earnings expectations. "Monsanto's genetically engineered seed sales are booming - a 20 per cent increase last quarter - and the company expects the growth to continue as it expands outside the U.S.. One reason may be Monsanto's extensive use of PR.

GM Watch's Jonathan Matthews looks at the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), a U.S.-based civil rights group that has all but sold out, with ties to Monsanto that has become an outspoken advocate of GE foods. Matthews reports on CORE's claims that the global environmental movement's opposition to biotech is "lethal eco-imperialism" and "devastates families and communities and kills millions every year." At CORE's annual Martin Luther King, Jr. dinner this year, they honored Karl Rove with a "Public Service Award." Monsanto's CEO Hugh Grant chaired the dinner with Option One Mortgage's president and CEO Bob Dubrish.

Since the AARP has gone on record against the Bush administration's proposed social security privatization boondoggle, Bush brain, Karl Rove is apparently launching a very nasty smear campaign to associate the organization with, among other things, hurting U.S. troops and promoting gays. I don't have any great respect for the AARP after they bent over to endorse the adminisration's prescription drug "benefit" scam, but this just goes to show you that you're never safe from retribution from the Bush administration if you don't unconditionally go their way.

Let's hope they use Wilford Brimley in their smear campaign and do a closeup of his eyes turning red and shooting bolts of fire at other AARP members.

It's no big secret now that the Republican administration has been paying media in return for reporting favorably on their agenda. But how far has this practice gone, and for how long, and to what degree has the media sold out? A look inside one of the many right-wing-funding-machines reveals that among other things, there are elaborate schemes developed where pundits rally their listeners and covertly collect information and sell it to conservative fundraising organizations.

We broke the story here about conserva-pundit Armstrong Williams' humongeous payola received from the Bush administration for promoting his "No Child Left Behind" scheme, and how the whole operation, funded with taxpayer money was kept quiet originally. Well, the "liberal media" has countered with a story about how the Dean campaign paid a few thousand bucks to a few bloggers online as if that's a tit-for-tat nullification for the dishonorable acts on the part of the administration. Many prominent cyber-pundits have pointed out this is totally a non-issue and far from comparable and that, unlike in the Armstrong Williams debacle, such endorsements were disclosed and not funded with taxpayer money. Nonetheless, mainstream media is launching this big steaming pile as a smokescreen over the much more grevious, unethical acts on the part of the Administration.

Last spring, when the anti-fast-food documentary Super Size Me began opening in American theaters, an opinion writer named Richard Berman swung into action. He cranked out a scathing op-ed for the Chicago Sun-Times that blasted the film for "serving up a flawed premise: that we're powerless to stop Big Food from turning us into a nation of fatties."

Berman unfortunately is one of those PR whores who spends his days appearing on tv, radio and getting op-ed pieces conveniently placed in key media whenever one of his clients is on the hot seat, but his hubris is unmatched in the distasteful way he'll exploit anything to further the interests of his corporate pimps.

Ever wonder what "force" was behind the big issue over Janet Jackson's breast on the Superbowl? Well, it's the PTC, Parents Television Council, a watchdog group that apparently is as much into exploiting BS and making money as they are enforcing their particular brand of morality.

The controversial veterans group that trashed the war record of Democratic Sen. John Kerry during the presidential campaign and helped hand President Bush a second term will remain a potent force, according to an associate of the group. They're "pondering their next step". Perhaps you too could have this group of lying, angry veterans (some of whom don't even know they're part of the organization) to help decimate your political opponent... IF the price is right.

It's always nice to see "the public" rallying for change in government. The latest perverse mutation of this notion is in the form of the Consumer Alliance for Affordable Natural Gas, the brainchild of "CONsumers" such as Dupont, Dow Chemical and the American Chemistry Council, who endeavor to remove regulatory restrictions on oil & gas drilling and access to the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.

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